HABITS OF THE OUANANICHE 9 



transformed them into ouananiche, suggests that the 

 original ouananiche were enterprising emigrants from 

 a former salt-water environment and voluntary set- 

 tlers amid new surroundings. They have certainly 

 been neither imprisoned nor landlocked against their 

 will, but it has not apparently occurred to the Eev. 

 Mr. Gamble that the ouananiche, instead of being an 

 immigrant or a settler, inhabits the home of its earliest 

 ancestors, while the emigrant is the salmon of the sea, 

 who when in salt water is a stranger and a sojourner, 

 as all his fathers were while there. " It would seem 

 to be a fact," he nevertheless says, "beyond reasonable 

 doubt, that at some past period of their piscatorial 

 destiny a colony of salmon from the sea, well satis- 

 fied with the depth of the waters and the abundance 

 of food in the Saguenay, concluded to secede from 

 their oceanic domain, and, remaining in their congenial 

 environment, founded a kingdom of their own." There 

 is more ingenuity in this theory than in that of im- 

 prisonment or landlocking, for it does not, like the oth- 

 er, presuppose conditions, the non-existence of which 

 is patent enough to anybody who will take the trouble 

 to visit the locality, and to descend the Saguenay from 

 Lake St. John to tidal water at Chicoutimi for the 

 purpose of investigating for himself. But it has little 

 else than this ingenuity and its novelty to recommend 

 it, and must be immediately abandoned when investi- 

 gating the case of ouananiche in the inland waters of 

 Labrador, sometimes found above falls of a hundred or 

 more feet in height. 



Despite the limited amount of competent observa- 

 tion that has been bestowed upon the Canadian ouan- 



